October 2014

by Anup Kaphle

October 14, 2009

Earlier this afternoon, President Barack Obama lighted the official White House diya (lamp) to mark
the celebration of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights this weekend. A local Hindu priest from Maryland recited the mantra as Obama lighted the lamp.

The president also signed the executive order re-establishing the President's Advisory Commission and White House
Initiative on Asian American and Pacific Islanders, a program which he hoped would improve the health, education, and economic status of AAPI
communities.

[NOTE: The ceremony marked the first-time that Diwali was observed in The White House itself. The Bush Administration traditionally celebrated Diwali in the Indian Treaty Room in the Old Executive Office Building, next to the main White House. And, yes, that's a different kind of Indian.]

"I think it's fitting that we
begin this work in the week leading up to the holiday of Diwali, the festival
of lights, when members of some of the world's greatest faiths celebrate the
triumph of good over evil," Obama said.

While this is a
time of rejoicing, it's also a time for reflection, when we remember those who
are less fortunate and renew our commitment to reach out to those in need.

While the significance of the
holiday for each faith varies, all of them mark it by gathering with family
members to pray and decorate the house and enjoy delicious food and sweet
treats. And in that spirit of celebration and contemplation, I am happy
to light the White House Diya, and wish you all a Happy Diwali, and a Saal
Mubarak.

Photos from the event are below:

President Obama lights the lamp to mark the celebration of Diwali.

President Obama addresses the audience before signing the AAPI executive order.

Penn Masala, the Hindi a capella group from UPenn, performed the song "Aicha" from their new album.

Kal Penn, who was appointed as the Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, helped putt the event together.

A Hindu priest from the Sri Siva Vishnu Temple in Maryland chanted the mantra as President Obama lighted the diya during the event.

May 20, 2009

The Sri Lankan government has made headlines across the world after
ending the 25-year Tamil Tiger rebellion, a victory that The Washington
Post's editorial board called a rare and "reversal of fortunes."
But what does it tell us about other struggles? While the United States
grapples with two wars abroad against fierce insurgents, one school of
thought is
that Sri Lanka has proved something.

But did Sri Lanka really set an example?

Yes, according to this editorial in the Wall Street Journal.
Four years ago, the newly elected government under Mahinda Rajapaksa
decided to launch a fullscale military offensive against the Tamil
Tigers, investing massive amount of resources in military and
counterinsurgency resources. That very determination, according to the
Journal, gave Sri Lanka an edge against one of the most skillful
insurgents ultimately defeating them.

No, writes
Bobby Ghosh of Time. While Sri Lanka might have set a great
standard militarily, Ghosh thinks that other countries fighting
insurgency should not attempt to follow its lead because the costs at
which Sri Lanka won the war amount to thousands of lives. "Rajapaksa's
triumph has come at a high cost in civilian lives and a
sharp decline in democratic values — and he is no closer to resolving
the ethnic resentments that underpinned the insurgency for decades," he
writes.

Of course, it's hard to rain on the Sri Lankan government's parade right now. Still, a shunned group
will only stay dormant for so long. If a democratically elected
insurgent group can come back to threaten a country, it's even more likely for a violently repressed group like the Tamils.

March 10, 2009

One of Israel's major arms manufacturing companies, Rafael, thought the smartest way to attract the Indians to buy their new weapons system would be to produce a Bollywood style video advertisement. I ran into this video as I was reading the Switchblog:

Defence Professionals, a website that covers international defence community, says in this article that India has been shifting its arms supply from Russia to Israel in recent years.

In 2008, Rafael won a contract worth some $ 340 million to provide 18
Spyder- short-range air defense systems as the Indian Air Force’s
low-level quick reaction missile system (LLQRM). The Israeli company is
now pushing the Spyder MR (medium-range) variant of the missile, with a
range of 35 kilometers, as the Indian Army’s next Medium Range
Surface-to-Air Missile (MRSAM) as well as the Spike MANPAD missile
system.

According to the Campaign Against Arms Trade, Rafael currently works with several big arms manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. More here:

Rafael expects orders worth $600m for Gill/Spike from Europe and seems
likely to get them as the Netherlands, Finland and Poland 9 have already ordered the weapon. Gill/Spike is also operational in Singapore. 10

Other Rafael exports include the Barak ship-borne anti-missile system to Chile and Singapore,11Popeye missiles to South Korea, 12and a co-production agreement with Turkey for Popeye II missiles.13

And now India. Wonder if the video sealed the deal.Please post your thoughts below.

February 02, 2009

I just downloaded the new Google Earth 5.0 after reading how awesome it was - it allows historic timeline search for any specific place, deep ocean exploration, tracking flights and many more. I've been playing with it for about 10 minutes and I already love it.

But here is what's really really surprising. The entire program downloaded in Hindi!

I have never installed Hindi on my laptop and I can't even access sites that publish their content in Hindi. So why would Google Earth automatically download in Hindi? For a moment, I thought Google started auto-catering to people who speak specific languages (Seriously, aren't they capable of doing anything?) But the irony lies in this - I speak and understand Hindi very well, but I am not Indian. Is Google making me stupid?

December 09, 2008

In a recently introduced list of several things, Time Magazine has also added the "Top 10 Underreported News Stories" of 2008. Sri Lanka's conflict ranks third, right after the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The title says that Sri Lanka's conflict this year is deadlier than Afghanistan. Yet somehow, there is very little news coming out of the island.

In January the Sri Lankan government pulled out of its shaky 2002 cease-fire
agreement with the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, in an official nod to
the fact that the country is once again engaged in civil war. Deadlier this
year than the fighting in Afghanistan, the combat has raged largely under
the radar because the government has banned from the war zone foreign
journalists as well as most aid groups, which is bad news for the 300,000
Sri Lankans who have been forced out of their homes.

November 29, 2008

When Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka left Brooklyn in 2003 to manage the Nariman House, the Jewish outreach center in Mumbai, they probably never imagined that their journey to serving the Jewish community would come to an end in the most unimaginable ways. Both Rabbu Holtzberg and his wife were killed during the terrorist attack of the Jewish center yesterday.

Below you will find audio clips from the series of SAJA Webcasts on Mumbai attacks where Rabbi Israel Derrin, emissary of Chabad in Connecticut, Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin, spokesman for the Chabad movement and Prof. Ari Goldman, a professor a Columbia Journalism School who has written extensively about religion.

1. Rabbi Israel Derrin talks
about Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and the services that he and the Chabad
house in Mumbai provide to the Jewish guests and the Jewish community
living in Mumbai.

2. Rabbi Israel Derrin
explains the tradition of Chabad houses and the Chabad-Lubavitch
movement which focuses on providing spiritual as well as material help
for members of the Jewish community.

3. Columbia J-school professor Ari Goldman talks about his personal
experience meeting Rabbi Holtzberg and the tradition behind sending
emissaries such as Holtzberg and his wife to a specific outpost to
serve the Jewish community.

4. Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin talks about Rabbi Holztberg and the amazing work he and his wife Rivka had been doing in the community.

Thousands of miles away from the scene of the attacks, Anil Kapur, who lives in Washington, D.C., learned that he lost his elder brother.Ashok Kapur, who was chairman of YES Bank (partly owned by Rabobank of the Netherlands), was having dinner at Trident-Oberoi hotel that Wednesday evening and was killed by the terrorists.

November 28, 2008

We're not exactly clear how this started, but as shown in this footage below, some locals disrupt CNN's New Delhi correspondent Sara Sidner while she was reporting Mumbai about the situation at Taj Hotel as chaos continued in Mumbai.

Here is what Sidner had to say later (from Mediabistro):

Sidner would later report, "As we were standing outside a large group
of people came around, many of them young, with the smell of alcohol on
their breath, frankly. They were standing very, very close and suddenly
chaos erupted."

Can anyone interpret what the locals are saying? Please post your reactions below.

November 20, 2008

When I first saw this on the Huffington Post, I thought it was some joke. But it's not.

Pruthviraj Patil, 11, is said to be probably one of few dozens of people in the world affected by a genetic disorder known as hypertrichosis, causing a thick layer of hair to grow on every part of the body except palms and feet.

When he was born in a village near Mumbai, his mother was told she
had given birth to a god, but in school, there have been more bullies
than believers.

An episode of the TLC series "My Shocking Story" chronicled the
efforts of a group of Columbia scientists, including dermatologist
Angela Christiano, to develop a cure for Pruthviraj's disorder, which
is estimated to afflict fewer than 50 people on the planet.

Pruthviraj's family has tried every imaginable treatment, from
homeopathy to laser surgery to a trip to the local barber, but the hair
always grows back.

November 19, 2008

The very generous folks at Typepad (which SAJA uses for SAJAForum) seem to have a plan for "recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist[s]." They call it the The Typepad Journalist Bailout Program.

Your Tumblr, while clever, will not pay your bills. We want to fix that. So we've made the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program.
While we can't promise it's going to replace having a full-time writing
gig, it gets you up and running with your own site that you can start
to benefit from. Let's outline the details, in true Digg-baiting
listicle format:

You get a free TypePad Pro blog account.
That's the real deal, the same service that powers big-name media
blogs, and it even includes professional support so we answer any
questions you have.

You get enrolled in the Six Apart Media advertising program. These are real display ads, that pay a lot more than simple Google text ads, and you get to keep the revenue.

We'll promote your new site on Blogs.com.
It's a fast-growing directory of the best in blogs, and Blogs.com will
be a very effective way for all of your peers in the Journalist Bailout
Program to cross-promote and share traffic for your independent sites.

Lots more. Getting started with Six Apart opens
the door to lots more ways to succeed in the future. We can introduce
you to our VIP program to help drive traffic to your site, help you
connect your blog to your LinkedIn profile, make it easy to manage your
site's comments from an iPhone, and even show you how to automatically
promote your posts to your Facebook friends.

And while they don't mention if the ad revenue is enough to buy your groceries, this definitely sounds like a cool deal. You save 150 dollars and your blogs will have a professional look with non-google-looking ads. But when it comes to searching your name on Google, your blog will still be a first result.We'd love to hear your thoughts on this program. Post them below.